The Greens' burning problem

Given this, it is therefore highly disengenuous of the Tasmanian Greens to be publicly supportive of fuel reduction burning when their determination to significantly reduce (and to ultimately end) the state’s native timber industry and disenfranchise its regulatory agency will significantly weaken Tasmanian bushfire management.     

This tendency for the Greens to say one thing whilst they or their ENGO associates are advocating other outcomes that will have an opposite effect, largely underpins scepticism about their supposed support for managing fuel loads and reducing bushfire impacts.

The Greens’ formal policies also reflect this contradictory behaviour. Their Environmental Principle No.14 states that they “want an effective and sustainable strategy for fuel reduction management that will protect biodiversity and moderate the effects of wildfire for the protection of people and assets, developed in consultation with experts, custodians and land managers”.

While this may sound good, its achievability is highly doubtful when considered against their policies for Forests, Plantations and Wood Products, specifically No. 15, which calls for the abolition of Regional Forest Agreements; and No. 16, which calls for a “complete transition (of timber industries)from native forests to existing plantations, including retraining and other assistance for workers.....”

So, while the Greens have a policy which supports effective fuel reduction, they have other policies that show their intent to completely eliminate an activity which, by necessitating the employment of both Government and industry workforces based within forests, arguably makes the greatest contribution to ensuring that effective bushfire management strategies are achievable.

There is also a question mark over how the Greens’ fuel reduction policy should be interpreted. Just how much burning would they support and would it be sufficient for effective fuel management?

The answers lie in the actions and utterances of their associates and supporters in the ranks of the ENGOs, including some elements of academia, who overwhelmingly favour small, targetted burns either adjacent to private property or to meet narrow ecological objectives. They are either opposed to or unenthusiastic about regular fuel reduction burning more widely across the landscape despite it being acknowledged by most fire scientists and practitioners as being essential for effective bushfire mitigation.

This opposition to broadscale burning seems to be largely rooted in misplaced ecological concerns for a landscape that, apart from the wettest areas, has naturally evolved over tens of thousands of years under a regime of frequent cool fires ignited by lightning or Aboriginal activity. Prior to European settlement, such fires could have been expected to trickle around for months at a time preventing forest litter and understories from developing the unnaturally heavy fuels that are now commonplace – a difference that is reflected in the earliest descriptions of the bush by the first European settlers and explorers.

With regard to southern and eastern Australia where the fuel reduction debate is concentrated, it also seems that those opposed to broadscale fuel reduction (including some conservation biologists) harbor unrealistic expectations about the extent and frequency of burning programs which far exceed what land management agencies would consider both desirable and logistically achievable. There can be no other explanation for why those purportedly concerned about the environment would otherwise be opposing an approach that aims to broadly reduce unnatural fuel build-up which will otherwise drive hotter and infinitely more damaging bushfires.

Much of the concern regarding fuel reduction burning also seems to be underpinned by an inability to discern differences in the environmental impacts of controlled cool fires burning slowly in autumn versus those from uncontrolled mid-summer bushfires burning intensely under hot and windy conditions. This misconception is evident in skewed views such as those recently expressed by a Tasmanian environmentalist who described broadscale fuel reduction burning as ‘a 1940s solution’ that ‘would be catastrophic in itself’ because ‘destroying habitat is not the answer’.

Similar sentiments have also been expressed by ENGOs during public debate over the prospect of increasing annual fuel reduction burning rates in Victoria’s public forests. For example, the Victorian National Parks Association articulated its opposition to broadscale fuel reduction in 2007 by warning that “If current strategic fuel reduction burning is increased to broad-scale burning, there will be concomitant losses in biodiversity and environmental services, such as water quality. In the medium term, some of the forests will be made more flammable by repeated burning.”

Similar over-the-top concerns about the practice were recently implied in comments made by the Victorian ENGO, Environment East Gippsland, which referred to fuel reduced forests as ‘fried forests’.